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Crowley nearly buys flowers.
They’d had a fight a few nights back, one that Crowley would certainly never apologize for but felt vaguely guilty about all the same. The exact argument was unimportant; it had started as an insult to Jane Austen and ended with Aziraphale denouncing Crowley’s “bee-bop” tastes entirely, but it wasn’t about either of those things, not really.
It takes him three days to stop his sulking and decide to swallow his pride. Without chewing, of course; he’s a snake after all. Admittedly, having a spat when you’re living in your car just means you… go and park it somewhere else, and he’s starting to miss running water and television. He’d been spending most of his days slouching around the bookshop, now that he doesn’t have any ‘official’ duties to attend to, and a vintage car seat tempted to recline doesn’t bring the same sort of comfort that a worn, plush leathery couch does. And his plants certainly aren’t as warm and companionable as his usual companion is.
So in the end, Crowley doesn’t bring flowers, but he does bring his smartest outfit, which historically tends to have the same effect.
Aziraphale doesn’t even look up when Crowley enters the shop, proud upturned nose buried in a book. Probably Jane Austen, because Aziraphale can be delightfully prissy when he wants to be (hint: At All Times). Crowley clears his throat.
Not even a page turn in acknowledgement. Brow quirking, he enacts ‘Plan B’. “Let’s have brunch.”
Aziraphale purses his lips, otherwise not moving. “I’m not hungry,” he says, though it comes out a little flat, like his corporal form isn’t used to saying those words together.
“Oh?” asks Crowley. He circles around the side of Aziraphale’s chair, as he oft does when he’s trying to be temptatious with subtlety. It’s hardly ever been subtle, Aziraphale has pointed out several times, but. It still works all the same. He keeps a polite distance, but drops his voice to an impolite octave. “Not even Jean-Carlo’s?”
Side-eyeing him suspiciously, Aziraphale says, “You didn’t.”
Crowley finishes his round to perch lightly at the only uncluttered edge of the desk, leg brushing Aziraphale’s. He shrugs. “In about fifteen minutes a married man with his mistress will be confronted with his irate wife, who was just tempted to take a different way home from work. Their table will become available, and–how lucky! A Mr. Anthony with a party of two is at the top of the waitlist.”
Now Aziraphale is looking at Crowley, if with his expressive blue eyes delightfully narrowed. ‘ Hook, line, singer’ Crowley thinks, not quite understanding fishing metaphors.
“The waitlist takes two months to move through,” says Aziraphale.
Crowley grins. “It’ll take us fifteen minutes. All set?”
Aziraphale gives him the dirtiest look an angel can manage.
A few moments later finds them outside in the bright summer mid-morning, strolling over to the side of the shop where Crowley’s claimed his permanent parking spot with a fake towing sign. He snaps his car unlocked, but Aziraphale immediately locks it again with a barely-there jerk of his head.
“I’m still quite cross with you, you know,” Aziraphale informs him above the hood of the Bentley.
Evidently. Crowley gropes around in his bottomless pockets to find his keys, nearly pricking himself on a crown-of-thorns plant he keeps forgetting about in there. “I know,” he says. “It makes a demon feel all warm inside.”
“I don’t understand why you’re so stubborn,” Aziraphale continues.
He finally gets the keys, jiggles them in the car door. “If it helps, I don’t know why either.”
When they slide in, Aziraphale steps on an empty box of Jaffa Cakes. There’s a sparse accumulation of trash, including empty liquor bottles and a few ripped-up parking tickets. He wrinkles his nose. “Really, my dear.”
“What?” grumbles Crowley, who is struggling to manually tilt his seat back up from its flat recline.
“We have a rule. No eating in the car.”
“I have a rule,” Crowley hisses, pulling the seat up much too far now, nearly smushing his face against the steering wheel. “And it’s null and void when my only other option is outside with the–with the mutant London rats for company.”
“But you like the rats.”
“In moderation–”
But Aziraphale’s already turned around in his seat, making his usual rounds to the venerable jungle Crowley has growing in the backseat. Crowley couldn’t have lived with himself if he abandoned them when hell took back his flat, not after he raised each of them from a seed. Besides, demons don’t even know what to do with living things, they’d–they’d use them for projectile vomit aiming practice, or something. It all happened so quick, he just grabbed whatever he could and high-tailed it out of there. Unfortunately, the throne came with the lease.
Aziraphale’s got his fingers tenderly curled into vines and leaves like they’re all individual handshakes. “Well, there’s Ophelia, and little Gertrude, and–Oh, hello Yorick, of course I wouldn’t forget about you–”
“They’re not named after Hamlet,” Crowley nearly whines.
Each time Aziraphale sees them, he tries to come up with a new naming variation, usually something set in the Western literary canon. It seems to always revolve around Shakespeare, as most things do, and a while back Crowley even humored him in hopes it would make up to the plants their less-than-ideal living conditions, but. There’s only so many times you can call a prayer plant ‘Titus Andronicus’ before putting your foot down.
Aziraphale harrumphs, spinning back around so he’s sitting in his seat properly. He tugs at his waistcoat to straighten it. “Well, whatever the names are, they’re not getting enough space or sunlight.”
Crowley waves a dismissive hand. “There’s windows.”
“Yes, tinted.”
He just cranks on the ignition and screeches out onto the main road. He decidedly doesn’t turn on music, ‘bee-bop’ or otherwise, and Aziraphale doesn’t bring up Jane Austen, either. But what Aziraphale does do is look at Crowley for a hard moment, before immediately softening with a quiet sigh. The gentleness of it all nearly singes the side of his face clean off. “You’re not getting enough space or sunlight, either,” Aziraphale says.
Crowley thinks, bitterly, I get too much sun. Poster child for melanoma, he is. For a demon, being near Aziraphale is the equivalent of slithering up to a flat rock and basking in the heat until it fries you like an egg. Too much can burn him straight through if he’s not careful, which he never is, anyway.
“I’ll get a heat lamp from the pet store,” he replies flatly, not checking his side mirrors before swerving haphazardly into the next lane.
“I’m being serious, Crowley. You’re actually looking to be quite pale.”
“You’re one to talk,” grumbles Crowley. “There is such a thing as too monochrome, you know.”
“Ah, yes, of course,” says Aziraphale drily, his gaze traveling somewhere in the vicinity of his chest, his abdomen, in a way that makes Crowley feel all twitchy inside, before he realizes Aziraphale is just making a bitchy sort of statement about Crowley’s own all-black fashion sense.
And he can’t think of a witty retort to that, save for, “... Shut up.”
Aziraphale studies the interior of the Bentley, as if he’s never seen it properly before. He tries to stretch his own legs, crinkles a nondescript wrapper, and winces. “I doubt you’re comfortable in here, my dear. You adore sprawling out on all sorts of things.”
Not even gonna go there, Crowley thinks with a vague sense of alarm.
“Those long legs of yours…” Aziraphale continues, trailing off. It seems to take him a moment to find his train of thought again. “This is ridiculous, Crowley. You leave our bookshop every evening just to walk seven steps–”
“Our bookshop?!” asks Crowley, only a touch shrill. He mentally wills Aziraphale to drop the conversation. Is this his penance for using the teeniest, tiniest bit of tempting to get Aziraphale to get into the car with him? He feels as though he has worse things to be punished for, all things considered.
Unfortunately, the next words are all-too familiar. “Why don’t you–”
“Stop,” warns Crowley. They’ve had this conversation about a dozen times.
“–move in with me?” Aziraphale finishes, unwavering. Despite the past dozen of times, his voice still sounds so bloody hopeful. It’s nothing Aziraphale hasn’t said before, but it still makes Crowley’s heart leap up into his throat, hang there like a sort of tree frog with sticky feet.
His grip squeaks on the wheel. “How many times am I gonna say ‘no’ before you stop asking?”
“Hard to say. You should save us both the trouble and say ‘yes’ instead.”
Crowley groans. “Angel–”
“You gave me a place to stay before I knew the bookshop had been brought back, when–” He swallows, blinks a few times quickly, “When we thought it was still burned down into rubble. Why won’t you let me repay you for it?”
Because there’s nothing to repay, Crowley wants to yell, wants to scream. You shouldn’t make this a transaction because I managed to do good by you very, very briefly. This isn’t a business. This is–This is that boring book about vampires you love , the one written by that gloomy bloke from the 1800s. If you invite me in I’ll ruin everything.
He says instead, “There’s not enough space for me there.”
Somehow, Aziraphale rolls his eyes loudly. “I’ve an entire flat upstairs,” he says slowly, like Crowley wasn’t already aware. “I haven’t opened the closet since the 80’s, so there’s room for your clothes. We’ll find space for the plants with plenty of sunlight. And if there isn’t enough space, in the end, I’ll make it–”
“Stop doing that!” exclaims Crowley. “Stop changing things to–to fit me, stop being so accommodating.”
Aziraphale huffs out something a bit annoyed. “You might as well tell me to stop–oh, I don’t know, stop feeding the feral cats that have nested in the foundations of the shop, or something.”
“Okay, n–yeah. Stop doing that too.”
They make it to Jean-Carlo’s with five minutes to spare. Crowley parks the Bentley but doesn’t turn it off, letting it idle in the summer heat, and nearly drops his head to the steering wheel on purpose. Because, yes, he would love to take whatever Aziraphale’s willing to offer him, but that’s just the demon part of him. The dark, twisted, greedy bits that, if given an inch, he would use that inch to drag the angel all the way down to hell with him.
But Aziraphale is relentless, when he senses something that needs healing. It’s like picking at a scab; in the end, nothing’s healed, just. Repeated. “You can’t be getting a good night’s sleep, Crowley. I know you can’t.”
“‘M fine,” he says gruffly, dropping his head back against the headrest with a thump . “I don’t need to sleep, anyway.”
“But you like sleeping,” Aziraphale replies, as if that means something. “All the more reason to move in with me. And I have–I have your favorite couch, for starters. And a bedroom, with a lovely, fluffy bed with only the thinnest layer of dust–”
Crowley scoffs. “Yeah, angel. A bedroom, as in, singular. I told you, there's just not enough room–”
“Precisely,” says Aziraphale, relieved to be understood. “Singular. It’s not as though we’ll be needing more than one.”
… Pardon?
It’s as though time has stopped again, only this time Crowley’s the passenger. The meaning behind the word settles in with shocking clarity and an even more shocking visual, and he nearly chokes on his own tongue (happened before, wasn’t pleasant). Aziraphale can’t be… surely he’s not implying… “Ngk, I mean,” Crowley somehow manages, “What I mean is, is you’ve only got one bedroom, one bed…”
“I understood you perfectly the first time, my dear boy.” And then Aziraphale leans slightly to the right, brushing their shoulders together, saying to Crowley in an amused, secretive sort of tone, “It’s a small bed, but I’m sure it'll manage just fine if you're in snake form. Ha!”
The five minutes have passed. Surely their table is ready by now. Aziraphale goes to open his door, but the Bentley’s handle is jammed, with or without Crowley’s interference.
“Are you drunk?” Crowley has to ask. “Right now.”
“Of course not,” says Aziraphale, and–oh, bloody heaven, why does he look so confused? As if them sharing a bed (!!!) is common knowledge that Crowley missed the class on. Psalms For Telling If The Angel Wants To Sleep With You 101.
It’s as if his entire worldview shifted on its axis, because it did, everything he thought neatly categorized as ‘true’ and ‘false’ impossibly shuffled. Since when… How… Did he even…? Crowley knows his own responses, knows what to tick on the online quizzical telling him ‘how your Zodiac sign decides which character from Friends you are’, one of his more favorite things to come out of his invention of mindless personality quizzes (he’s Rachel, by the way). He knows by now what he wants, been sitting with it too long not to come out of it with a good enough understanding, save for details (he hasn’t been able to figure out if he’s the pitcher or the catcher, mostly because he’s never watched baseball).
And then he realizes that he’s been given something on a silver platter, here, something he’s been wanting to order for ages now. Quite literal ages–empires have been built and have been destroyed in the time he’s been wanting to reach anything resembling a ‘base’ with Aziraphale, whatever that means. He wishes so desperately to say something cool, sexy. He’s a demon, it should be second nature to him. He could lean over, place a heavy hand on Aziraphale’s thigh and murmur, ‘Oh, that bed? We won’t be using it for sleeping, angel’. Or, ‘How exactly do you want me in our bookshop? Over the counter?’ Or perhaps Crowley could just lean over, tangle his fingers through those downy curls and finally, finally snog him senseless. Yes, let’s do that one.
But then, just as Crowley shifts in his seat towards him, Aziraphale says, “I haven’t slept since the 18th century, after all. Seems a waste for the bedroom to continue going unoccupied, so really, dear, you don’t have to continue being so stubborn about this because you would be doing me a favor–”
For the second time that morning, everything in Crowley’s brain screeches to a halt, but the ground is slippery, so it just becomes a catastrophic pile-up of thoughts and epiphanies and oh you fucking donkey , he meant–
Aziraphale continues, unperturbed, “I’ll let you think about it a bit more, dear. Are you ready to go inside?”
He meant his bedroom for Crowley to sleep in, alone. Singular. Because Aziraphale doesn’t sleep. Right. Yes. Crowley knew this already. Aziraphale slides out of the Bentley, the plants shake, and Crowley does thump his head on the steering wheel this time, horn blaring for so long and so loud that they end up missing their table and Crowley has to bring Aziraphale flowers in the end, anyway.